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The Underachiever #2: Saints Row 2

No doubt, Stillwater's drag-racing challenges carried some achievements. But I looked through the postings and applied for a better job: Crowd Control. The first level of this activity, which found me pulling bodyguard duty for celebrities all over the city, transported me to a red-carpet cocktail on a rooftop. A hot model -- my client -- stepped out of a chopper, and I got straight to work tossing unruly fans through tables, off the roof, and into the helicopter blades.

This got me into another good groove. I tossed fools into gravestones, onto city fountains that sprayed them high in the air, through baggage-claim conveyers that squished them into a pulp; wherever the gig took me, I played along. Gradually, I was rewarded with 5G: Love Thy Neighbor for grabbing 50 human shields, and 5G: Going the Distance for throwing someone "a long, long way."

It really wasn't much, but it was honest work. The points felt like real, hard-earned dough.

Bigger points were offered in exchange for completing all levels of Crowd Control. Unfortunately, I didn't have the skills for it. The mobs eventually overwhelmed me, and my enthusiasm waned. A freelancer at heart, I quit a bad situation and changed jobs again.

Drug Trafficking, it turned out, was my true calling. In each level, I found myself sitting shotgun in a new neighborhood, letting the dealer drive while I got rid of cops and rival gang vehicles. You'd think that it would be jarring to have a sandbox game drag-and-drop your avatar across the city at its whim. But the flow from Level 1 to 2, from Level 2 to 3, and so forth, was a natural one. And in Drug Trafficking, it was an extra blessing to have the game steer me around while I did my part. It wasn't too long before I heard the ding of 15G: Purple Haze. Job well done.

So very little exploration or experimentation actually happened. In fact, grabbing achievements felt a lot like running errands -- cleaning up, taking out the trash, etc. -- which is exactly what some commenters in the previous installment of this column said was terribly wrong about the whole phenomenon.

But I'm willing to play errand boy if the odd jobs lose me in the game. A task like picking up every flag in the Holy Land of Assassin's Creed, that's a chore. Laying down cover fire for the dope pusher at the wheel? That's real.

If Crackdown was basically a platformer with extra ammo, Saints Row 2 took me beneath the surfaces of the game, deep into all the shady workings of the city. It didn't matter that the achievements were lean and took ages to pop up -- I was too busy scanning the classifieds, and following Stillwater's many leads, to worry about things like fake points.

Achievements earned: 3Points gained: 25

Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen Magazine, and a freelance writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. And please don't laugh at his Gamerscore -- he's working on it.